We were approached by James Installations and Maintenance for a new website that would both improve the appearance of the company online and potentially bring new business in through people searching on Google for an electrician in Cardiff or an electrical contractor in the South Wales area. We developed a new image for the company and then proceeded to develop the website and content, the result is this electrician website, which the client is very happy with.

On a personal note, I have used James as an electrician at my home and the work completed was faultless and very reasonably priced. I would recommend James Installation and Maintenance for any electrician type work large or small.

The latest addition to Google’s SERPs is their new Instant Preview feature. This allows searchers to “preview” a website or landing page prior to clicking through to it. Searchers can preview any listing in the organic results by either clicking the description, or the small magnifying glass icon to the left of every listing. The overview is displayed in a pop up window which shows a snapshot of the destination page, highlighting where the relevant search term appears on that page.

Through the preview pop up screen, searchers can get a feel for the site on the other side of the link; images, headlines, colour and general layout all have a major impact.  With relatively small size of the pop up window, prominent design features are more likely to catch a searchers eye as small text is difficult to read. This will make the first impression, or snapshot of your site, vital to traffic generation much like an advert in a magazine. You will only have 2-3 seconds to grab the searchers attention.

Some factors to consider when designing for instant preview:

Images

The prominence of images which are product or service specific will become even more important in your web design. Larger images allowing a clearer view of your offerings should be used to communicate instantly the thrust of your site. Smaller images or cluttered images will have less impact than a clear, large image in the new preview window. Pages containing long, text heavy content will look very dull and uninviting, whereas an image will allow you to make best use of the 2-3 second exposure.

Headlines

With small text so difficult to read in the preview window, anything in a larger font or bold will stand out as a headline. The searchers eye will be drawn to these sentences first, so make good use of them. Ensure your keywords are present and that the message you are trying to convey is clear and legible within your headlines.

Page load time

Page load times are an important factor in SEO as well as web design, but speed will be even more important with instant preview. If your images fail to render in the short space of time a searcher is hovering over your listing they will very, very quickly move onto the next. Combine this with the need to have bold images on your site, and a balance will need to be struck between image size, quality and load time.

Flash

As usual, Google has a problem with Flash, and Instant Preview is no exception. Flash sites or page elements are failing to display in the preview, making sites look broken or incomplete. This will deter searchers from clicking through to your site, especially if that flash element was critical to your product/service offering. This will result in fewer clicks, which will in turn lead to lower rankings and fewer sales.

Introduction pages

A good website designer will avoid introduction pages altogether, but there are still a great deal of sites out there using intro pages. Again, we have seen issues with these pages failing to display in previews, making your site appear broken and unattractive. This will have a serious impact on your click through rate and your rankings in the search engines.

So overall, instant preview presents new challenges as well as opportunities for web designers, both in design and SEO terms. Greater consideration will need to be given to what is legible and effective within the smaller preview window as well as on the site itself.

Here at Designer-Websites.co.uk we can ensure you have the edge over your competition with website design which takes advantage of Google’s new instant preview feature.

Ask any SEO professional and they will tell you JavaScript can be a double edged sword when it comes to website development, specifically in terms of design over SEO. Why? Well let’s take a look.

First things first, search engines don’t crawl JavaScript, so any keywords present within the script will be ignored, which is not good for SEO. You might think that this is not so important but actually one of the most important aspects of a website is the navigation and many websites utilise JavaScript for the menu or primary navigation. Many sites appear to use comments within JavaScript in an attempt to alleviate this problem; however the search engine robots will ignore any comments within script tags, so this will not help.

Another problem which arises with the use of JavaScript in website design is the search engines may see it as an attempt to mislead their bots because this has been a black hat method used by some poor SEO companies to display different information to bots than that which is displayed to the website visitors.

These issues are especially prevalent in navigational links where unscrupulous coders will hide redirects to different URL’s through JavaScript coding. This can actually result in search engines not indexing an entire section of your site as they ignore your top level navigation. Best practise would be to remove JavaScript from navigational links altogether and rely on HTML links instead.

If you’re website design does rely on drop down menus or other dynamic navigation then our advice would be to scrap it and adopt the use of CSS instead, you can get fantastic effects and probably the same appearance by using CSS.

Loading time is another issue affected by JavaScript. The overuse of JavaScript can slow down your website’s load time which not only affects the visitor experience, but also has an impact on your SEO. Load time is just one of many factors search engines use to rank your website.

How can JavaScript be used positively in Website Design?

JavaScript is best used to provide quick user interaction and help make the website more attractive to the end user, so using it to draw attention to call-to-action boxes, speeding up form submission and generally improving the visitor experience will help the website seem less static and more engaging for the user. This can be done without compromising the SEO by ensuring that the JavaScript is used on non-structural and navigational sections of the website.

So if you are going to use JavaScript, here are some tips to reduce the SEO negatives:

• Stick to HTML links where possible
• Do not use JavaScript for menus or indeed any primary navigational elements
• If using JavaScript with images or video make sure you use <alt> and <noscript> tags to offer a text alternative which is placed in the HTML markup
• Move your JavaScript to an external .JS file
• Place the actual script at the bottom of the page code i.e. just before the end body tag

If you are worried about making such changes to your website yourself then it’s probably time to call on the services of dedicated website developers.  Designer Websites provide high quality search engine optimised websites for businesses. Contact us today to discuss your website needs.

We released a garden decking website back last year and the site is doing incredibly well, we are happy to say. Having recently seen the quality of the decking once it is down I have to say how amazed I am at how good it looks! I have personally put timber decking down and it was hard work and needs staining every year, so this composite decking makes me cringe at how much time and effort we have wasted on timber decking, and continue to waste I might add!

If you are thinking about decking right now, whether it be for your garden or your roof top balcony, or even for a commercial premises I would urge you to first look at this composite decking from Timbertech, it is a little more expensive up front, but will be easy to maintain, will look better than other decking and will also be fitted easier!

Don't take my word for it - take a look at this composite decking site now.

There is absolutely no point having a website no one is going to be able to find. You could have a fantastic business plan, a market which is just ripe for the plucking, and the world’s most gorgeous website. That’s all well and good but how do your customers find you on the web.

What do you mean you’re on page 34 of Google? I’m not going to scroll through 34 pages to find your company, when there are hundreds of other reputable providers who can offer a similar product or service. So as a company, you need to make sure your website ranks highly on the internet search engines to bring in the targeted traffic; and here’s how you do it.

Write good content

Good website content is crucial for any well ranked website. It must be appropriate not just to the website, but also the specific page you’re targeting. Keywords: make sure they are placed in the correct places and throughout the body copy of the document. This alone will help your ranking over time.

Persistent content

Keep the site updated with fresh and relevant content. Whether you do this by updating pages regularly, such as blogs, news or an events section, or with the addition of features such as calendars, forums or newsletters; it is up to you.

Keep site navigation simple

Through a combination of menus, sub menus, a site-search function and ideally a form of site map, your site viewers must be able to access the content they’re looking for quickly. A general rule of thumb is that users should be able to access the content they want within three clicks. Otherwise they are likely to become frustrated and leave.

Give users what they want

Does your site contain all the information your users are likely to need? For example, if you owned a local takeaway, why not look into having an online menu and perhaps an online booking system? Maybe even a newsletter or a Twitter feed to keep your customers informed of any promotions you might have on.

Regularly review your site

Customers’ tastes change all the time and as new technologies become more readily available it is advised to adapt the website to reflect these changes. Mobile browsing has been on the increase for some time and is looking like a new technology which is here to stay. Developing a mobile friendly site will help you get ahead of your competition. 

Here at Designer Websites we use our mix of technical expertise and commercial know-how, providing you with elegant, functional websites, which can be fully optimised for search engine success. Call us now on 0845 272 6813 to take things further.